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 Massawyrm wrote:
It's just a certain breed of gamer prefers it.

And this is where you keep going wrong. A garage is a location for a game, it is not a style of play. Your utopian ideal "garage gamer" has very little to do with reality.

But you run into the Sister of battle problem in which it becomes cost prohibitive to update an army because you know sales are likely to be small.

Then you don't update that army. I'm not saying that diversity is bad, I'm just pointing out that "diversity is good regardless of profits" is nonsense. All that matters from GW's point of view is how much profit they're making. Sales diversity is only relevant when it results in increased profits.

People have been leaving GW for years - and returning players comment here on Dakka all the time with a "I got out when the meta did this thing," and "I hated croissant spam and Grey Knight cheese," and what have you.

And what exactly makes you think that garage gaming solves this problem? A person that quits because of croissant spam is going to quit regardless of whether they play against croissant spam in a store or in a garage.

When you control the meta, you are less likely to get chased off by what happens in it.

But you don't control the metagame, since you still have another player (or players) making their own armies. In fact, the garage gamer is more vulnerable to being chased off by a bad metagame because they have fewer potential opponents available. A player at a store with a decent community can just play against someone else. A garage gamer who only plays with one other person has no similar option if their opponent builds an army that they don't like.

How many threads have I read in which you swing your snark bat around in defense of Forge World, complaining how people won't play against it, leading to people not bringing it? The issue with the meta isn't that the rules suck, it's that when three or four guys at your store say "We hate this and we won't use this," it impacts the 30 others who would be fine with it but some people WON'T SHUT THE FETH UP ABOUT HOW BROKEN FORGE WORLD IS. Things get even dicier when it is your local store owner making the calls of what can and can't be played with in their store. "If I don't sell it, you can't play with it." ITC polls their players asking them whether they want things included or not. When 40% said they absolutely refused to play with superheavies after Escalation, they banned them whole hog. A number of stores use the ITC rulings for their tournaments, and the meta of virtually every game played in a store, be it MTG or Warmachine or Dicemasters, revolves around the tournament meta. "Oh, I'm practicing for an upcoming tournament which doesn't allow Forge World, so I'm not going to play against your Corsairs because I won't face any."

Why do you think that any of this has anything to do with garage gaming vs. store gaming? Do you honestly think that "garage gamers" never do things like ban FW models or follow common tournament rules?

Congratulations. You answered the rhetorical question. You play in a cool meta. A lot of metas are not so cool. See above for a few examples.

And that's exactly the point! There are good store communities that encourage the same kind of playing and buying as your perfect garage gamer, and there are bad garage communities that have all of the problems of your horrible store. The location of a game has nothing to do with how it is played, and abandoning in-store gaming in favor of saying "go play at home" does not help GW at all because moving those former in-store players to another location doesn't change how they play the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Massawyrm wrote:
If D&D 4E taught us anything, it is that players aren't drawn to balance.

4th edition D&D taught us no such thing. It didn't sell poorly because it was balanced, it sold poorly because it was different. It completely abandoned 3rd edition and tried to be tabletop WoW, and WOTC's existing customers didn't want to play tabletop WoW.

It's why power creep is an industry wide phenomenon.

It isn't industry-wide. For example, X-Wing has very little, if any, power creep.

When everything is perfectly balanced, players aren't encouraged to buy more product.

That's only true if the product sucks. If the product is appealing then even in a balanced game people will want to try new things. And this is especially true in a fluff-driven game like 40k, where a major part of the game is building your own army to match the stories you want to tell. It doesn't matter if a LRBT and an infantry squad are both equally powerful (relative to their point costs), if you decide you want to add some tanks to your army you're still going to buy the LRBTs.

GW deals with this by making their newer units beefier than their older ones, and making their reissued kits the new hotness.

No they don't. GW often releases new kits with mediocre rules, or even terrible rules. We just remember the overpowered ones a lot more.

When was the last time Dev and Assault squads were A-list units? Oh look, new Dev and Assault Squad kits! SUCK ON MY SKYHAMMER!!!!

So, if power creep is supposed to sell models, why did GW publish the formation as a limited-edition bundle that sold out within a week? You can't (legally) get those rules anymore, so if you missed the initial sale then you have no incentive to buy those kits. If GW really wanted to use power creep to sell assault and devastator squads they would have put the formation in the codex, or at least allowed you to buy it at any time.

 Peregrine wrote:
A garage is a location for a game, it is not a style of play. Your utopian ideal "garage gamer" has very little to do with reality.

Except that it's my reality, and the reality that several other garage gamers have shown up in this very thread to echo. It's not just a different location, it's a different environment. One with very different social contracts. The same way I don't think you talk to people at your store the way you talk to them on the internet, you don't necessarily play against your closest friends the way you play against a stranger. When you say "Dude, don't bring that list to this store again; it wasn't any fun to play against," how likely is someone you barely know going to take you seriously? Hell, just thinking about saying that to someone will make some folks cringe. But when you say it to your buddy at your house, he's probably going to nod sheepishly, apologize, and bring a different list next time. But the real magic is that usually that doesn't happen. "Don't be a dick," isn't a rule you usually have to enforce in your own home. It's the understood law of the land - unless you and your friends like playing like that. Home metas aren't simply *as diverse* as the store metas you've decided to angrily wave your banner for; they are more diverse. Oldhammer isn't a new thing, it's something people have been doing from their homes since 2nd.

But again, I don't know how many times I have to stress it before you stop pretending I'm saying the opposite: I DON'T THINK GARAGE GAMING IS BETTER THAN STORE GAMING. It's just different. Thinking otherwise tells me you've either rarely done it or that you have a crap group of friends.

4th edition D&D taught us no such thing. It didn't sell poorly because it was balanced, it sold poorly because it was different. It completely abandoned 3rd edition and tried to be tabletop WoW, and WOTC's existing customers didn't want to play tabletop WoW.

As the first guy in the world to compare 4th to WoW and having had in thrown back in my face for 6 years, I can tell you unequivocally that the WoW comparison was about the balanced classes, monsters and items. Otherwise, how the hell was 4e like WoW in any way that wasn't WoW ripping off D&D? 2nd was a huge departure from 1st, 3rd was an even larger departure from 2nd than 4th was from 3rd - I mean 3rd actually changed every mechanic but Vancian spell memorization, while 4th kept most of the d20 system intact. But 4th, the only edition with any modicum of balance, is the one everyone rejected. And they rejected it saying it was too balanced, like a video game.

It isn't industry-wide. For example, X-Wing has very little, if any, power creep.

Yes, let's cite a game from the biggest IP in the world, that is still in its infancy, and still isn't coming close to GWs market share. If FFG can still pull that off 5 years from now, I will be elated. I've got good friends working there. I want them, and the model, to succeed. But right now it's too young to cite as an example. EVERYTHING Star Wars does well early on.

That's only true if the product sucks. If the product is appealing then even in a balanced game people will want to try new things.

Strongly disagree. There are a number of great, very well balanced miniatures games out there that can't keep player interest long enough to build a strong player base without power creep. There's a reason you ran to X-Wing. Even the old bastions of anti-power creep have given in to the market.

So, if power creep is supposed to sell models, why did GW publish the formation as a limited-edition bundle that sold out within a week?

Because they knew we would still play with it. And we are. They won't rerelease them (shame) because that would nullify their EXCLUSIVE! But we're still going to use it. If ITC chooses to ban it, you might see some backlash against it, but I doubt they will. Those guys won't support Pay2Win.

" D&D deals with this by releasing books with increasingly more powerful feats, classes and spells"

Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.

"But 4th, the only edition with any modicum of balance, is the one everyone rejected."

It's because they were lazy and turned everyone into a sorcerer. People aren't drawn to imbalance, but rather variety of choices and meaningful choices.

Martel732 wrote:
Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.

Which edition are you talking about? Certainly not 1st-3.5. 4th had rigid balance and they expanded solely through additional classes and delayed completion of previous classes. And 5th isn't a year old yet. So, you know, try again.

 Massawyrm wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.

Which edition are you talking about? Certainly not 1st-3.5. 4th had rigid balance and they expanded solely through additional classes and delayed completion of previous classes. And 5th isn't a year old yet. So, you know, try again.

It's true for 3.X and Pathfinder. Splat books were mostly lateral choices, not power creep. Mostly whiney GMs who didn't want to learn new rules complained about "power creep". If you can find things more broken than druid or 2H power attack in the splat books, be my guest. Try again indeed.

Martel732 wrote:
It's true for 3.X and Pathfinder. Splat books were mostly lateral choices, not power creep. Mostly whiney GMs who didn't want to learn new rules complained about "power creep". If you can find things more broken than druid or 2H power attack in the splat books, be my guest. Try again indeed.

Dear lord, the levels of wrong in that statement are mind boggling. By the end of 3.5 there were feats that allowed players to swap higher level spells for multiple lower level spells or combine lower level spells to get higher ones, feats that shook off dazed and stun (including effects that you put upon yourself), spells that let you cast more than once a turn, races that could effectively fly at lvl 1, and broken prestige classes that dwarfed everything that had come before it - so much so that playing a starting class to completion was hamstringing yourself. 2H power attack and Druid are your go to's? Yikes. So much more in the books more broken than that.

And Pathfinder was power creep from the get go. The entire system was 3.5 on steroids.

I playtested a lot of 3.5 stuff, and by the end the whole thing had just gotten silly.

 Massawyrm wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
It's true for 3.X and Pathfinder. Splat books were mostly lateral choices, not power creep. Mostly whiney GMs who didn't want to learn new rules complained about "power creep". If you can find things more broken than druid or 2H power attack in the splat books, be my guest. Try again indeed.

Dear lord, the levels of wrong in that statement are mind boggling. By the end of 3.5 there were feats that allowed players to swap higher level spells for multiple lower level spells or combine lower level spells to get higher ones, feats that shook off dazed and stun (including effects that you put upon yourself), spells that let you cast more than once a turn, races that could effectively fly at lvl 1, and broken prestige classes that dwarfed everything that had come before it - so much so that playing a starting class to completion was hamstringing yourself. 2H power attack and Druid are your go to's? Yikes. So much more in the books more broken than that.

And Pathfinder was power creep from the get go. The entire system was 3.5 on steroids.

I playtested a lot of 3.5 stuff, and by the end the whole thing had just gotten silly.

I respectfully disagree, and stand by my statement.

The idea that 4th failed because it was "balanced" is absurd. It was a boring version of an MMO that was simplified without any meaningful character choices.

Also, I don't think GW's crappy rules "appeal to garage gamers." It just sounds like garage gamers have much lower standards because they just make up whatever they want.
That's not an upside to crappy rules.

@Massawyrm: The key factor that makes "garage gaming" different than at a FLGS is the majority of the time it is gaming with friends.
We already can talk ahead of time and house-rule or play "straight-up" with little difficulty.
I work around meta-game shortcomings by making scenarios to try to level things out a bit: like tournament rules.

FLGS you run into "pick-up" games so you have no idea on power levels being brought to the table since GW has no balance to the point values.

I personally think of garage gaming as a bad thing: it is too insular, you do not meet new people, it does not promote the hobby and get new players.

I do "both" BTW, each has a particular joy for me.

GW thinks it is a premium model company, I make these models now with the intent to play games and not to sit on a shelf to display: I want them seen and used.
They continue with this business model, I see little I would be buying in the future.

 MWHistorian wrote:
The idea that 4th failed because it was "balanced" is absurd. It was a boring version of an MMO that was simplified without any meaningful character choices.

But that *is* balance and exactly what I'm talking about. A 4e character is going to do roughly the same damage and hit roughly as often taking one set of feats as they do another, thus they weren't "meaningful." The same thing applies to 40k. If a unit is costed perfectly with all of its other counterparts, rating damage output vs survivability (the balance system in place in 4e) along with point variance for speed, your choices are equally meaningless. Plague marines will end up costing only slightly more than CSM because, while they last longer on the board they also have fewer guns for an equal number of points. Who cares if you're playing SM or CSM if all their points lead to the armies being effectively same? In a system like that, things only look different and have marginally different abilities. Just like the character classes in 4e.

Also, I don't think GW's crappy rules "appeal to garage gamers." It just sounds like garage gamers have much lower standards because they just make up whatever they want.
That's not an upside to crappy rules.

The rules we're talking about aren't crappy. They're narrative. They make terrain matter more than a straight cover save. Some of us like that. We like things like exploding barrels and buildings that provide distinct advantages on the field over other buildings on the field. But they're also the type of thing that creates imbalance in tournament environment. Tournaments rules are best when all things are equal. Ending up on a field where your opponent gets much more useful terrain on his side of the board because he got a lucky die roll gives them the kind of advantage that destroys that balance. The only thing guys like me enjoy making up are our stories. That's why rules like this have been great for us - we've been given reams of options for creating those stories without having to make up our own rules.

 Ghazkuul wrote:
The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!

The internet makes it harder for small hobby stores to compete as well its not just GW. With 20-25% off and free shipping offered regularly buy bulk hobby stores from major cities, the average small town/city hobby store just cant make the GW product work for them. My FLGS offeres 20% off everything to members, for a small fee, but also has many other benefits like a key that i can use to play a game at anytime when the store is normally closed. Memeber only nights, and a members meetings that allow for feedback into the how to improve the store, weither it be more tournaments or new games introduce. Too those few on here that bad mouthed ccg's, the store I frequent will tell you that they make more money on MTG in a week than GW products in a month.

I started in the garages since the first store where I lived went belly up, not because of poor customer base, but poor owner investment and buisness practices. Small armies only, not tournament/serious players. What a joke that comment is, we all had large collections of multiple GW armies and regularly went to places for tournaments.



I seriously suggest you start up a garage group ity worth the effort. There are many ways to make cheap and storable terrain and playmats.

4x6 cut lengths of carpeting are cheap and can easily rolled up to store. look for the semi-solid underside carpet its very playable. Green, grey, white, and red are easy carpet colors to find and still show up on glued underside.
1/4" Masonite or MDF board is cheap and a 4x8 board can make alot of small to medium ruins. If made correctly it is easily stored in a storage tote from rubbermaid or the like.
Also, a piece of the masonite/mdf board with bulk trees from railroad scenery is ideal for woodlands. don't glue the trees just place them on the board and remove to store, easy and cheap.

 Massawyrm wrote:
The rules we're talking about aren't crappy. They're narrative.

Depends on perspective.

They make terrain matter more than a straight cover save. Some of us like that. We like things like exploding barrels and buildings that provide distinct advantages on the field over other buildings on the field. But they're also the type of thing that creates imbalance in tournament environment. Tournaments rules are best when all things are equal. Ending up on a field where your opponent gets much more useful terrain on his side of the board because he got a lucky die roll gives them the kind of advantage that destroys that balance. The only thing guys like me enjoy making up are our stories. That's why rules like this have been great for us - we've been given reams of options for creating those stories without having to make up our own rules.

This is the thing though, it is sold as a "wargame" when really it is a broad strokes 40k "sandbox".
This is why the present form of 40k is likened to a tabletop RPG because you either employ bleeding edge competitiveness (where it works to a degree due to so many variables) or very little.
Let us say when I signed on to play for 40k it was very much a war game, I had no such agreement for it to be what it is now.
The assumption is that anything with a points value would provide some measure of balance, that is a fallacy in 40k.

What you outline is that the game is little more than a narrative where as long as some story unfolds you are happy.
You may have to excuse others when they are somewhat dissatisfied with this "forging the roll your own adventure narrative".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

 Massawyrm wrote:
If D&D 4E taught us anything, it is that players aren't drawn to balance. Rather, they are drawn to imbalance.

*snip*

But then, I'm the guy who still plays D&D 4E every Friday night because I love the balance of the system. But I understand why the gaming industry needs the creep.

I have no idea how you arrived at the former if you actually do the latter. First off, wargames revolve inherently around confrontation whereas RPGs are inherently cooperation based (even the GM's job is to make sure you earn a victory, not simply to stop it at all costs). In the former, balance is key to get a good experience (whether that balance is reflected in a points system or asymetric objectives for unequal forces). In the latter, gross imbalance is bad but the tolerances for what is considered adequetely balanced are alot wider. In an RPG group, if the rogue is a bit OP it's generally ok because the rogue is ON YOUR SIDE, not opposing you one on one in most cases. It only becomes an issue if one guy steals the spotlight with a massively OP class combo and even then it isn't as bad as in a wargame because your side (the party) still wins when he/she does. If a particular army is OP in a wargame, it is an issue because it's generally just you versus just them. If that is the same logic you're using to come at your garage gamers theory, I have to firmly disagree. Also, the common complaint about 4e (among many others) was that it was "balanced" to the point of boredom because that balance was acheived by frequently copy pasting the same abilities to every class with only minor tweaks. The rogue was "balanced" with the fighter because they basically both were constructed using the same abilities and rules with only minor tweaks, not because those powers were different yet still balanced.



In any case, "balance" had nothing to do with the demise of 4e.

 warboss wrote:
Also, the common complaint about 4e (among many others) was that it was "balanced" to the point of boredom because that balance was acheived by frequently copy pasting the same abilities to every class with only minor tweaks.

In any case, "balance" had nothing to do with the demise of 4e.

This is the third time in this thread that someone has come in saying some iteration of 'It's not the balance, it was the balance."

In your example, the Rogue and Fighter were balanced by the fact that the rogue could do an additional 2d6 damage with combat advantage (with access to a number of abilities facilitating that), but had a lower AC and hit points than the Fighter (who had abilities that drew attacks from monsters) making them play very differently on the table despite their mechanics looking very similar in carefully curated examples. In the early playtest materials for 4th, they included the statistical breakdowns they used for survivability vs damage output, with the scaling all the way up to 30th for the creation of new classes and monsters - materials they ended up omitting from the final product. The entire thing was built elegantly on math that seemed very simple on the surface, but went pretty deep. Each class managed to play differently despite their ultimate damage output/effect on the game being nearly identical in scenarios taking them from full health to zero.

I still play it because I love how it plays on the tabletop, and because I've grown tired of many of the legacy issues that plagued the game from 1st - 3rd. When I want to have some crazy, imbalanced fun, I invite over a few select friends and we blow through a BECME module. But for our weekly game, we go with 4th.

I agree with your notion of what a wargame *should* be, but what I'm talking about isn't some platonic ideal - I'm talking about the very real marketing problems GW is facing and their attempts to solve them. I cited the balance rejection of 4e, and you guys came in to say it wasn't the balance, it's that you didn't like the way they balanced it. And I'm having a devil of a time trying to see the distinction. I don't believe there's some magical balance system that will somehow sell more GW minis. And it's clear that GW doesn't seem to think so either.

As a garage gamer, I find that I don't get to play as many games as I could if I were a dedicated store gamer. My friends and I have families and jobs, and so getting a game in is a rarer occasion than I'd like it to be. Of course, that is one of the primary reasons I became a garage gamer, life doesn't really support me playing at the local stores. That being said, I find that the few games I DO get to play in my garage are far more enjoyable than those in a store. There are a lot of things I don't have to worry about in my garage, such as cheating, min/maxing, store gamers inability to respect personal space and property. I do miss the player and army variety though.

 Massawyrm wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.

Which edition are you talking about? Certainly not 1st-3.5. 4th had rigid balance and they expanded solely through additional classes and delayed completion of previous classes. And 5th isn't a year old yet. So, you know, try again.

3.0 and 3.5 by there baseline stackable traits AND races that were half-whatever making starting characters effectively 4th level had those rules in the core rulebook. They broke themselves from the start. The supplements just made an already broken system even worse I've played D&D for 38 years, since Chainmail, played a couple games of 3.0 and 3.5 and threw the lot in the trash because right from the start the game was broken. Hoped that 3.5 would improve/fix things, but it didn't. 4th edition was balanced, but painfully homogeneous as all the classes in a given role played pretty much exactly the same on the map. That is not balance it is symmetry and symmetry IS boring. It also turned the worlds longest standing roleplaying game into an overglorified table top miniatures wargame. 4th edition also had its stackable BS and required characters to be loaded down with magic items to be successful as they gained levels so monty haul was a required part of the meta to survive at higher levesl. So 4th edition had a lot of problems that drove people away from it. We tried to like 4th edition, but it bored and annoyed us equally quick. People didn't avoid it because it was balanced. They avoided 4th edition D&D because it sucked on many levels unless you played games like 12 year olds regularly do. 5th edition now is much better and what 4th should have been. The classes are relatively balanced in power level, but they are different from each other. Strikers in 4th edition all played basically the same way, while striker-like characters in 5th have very different mechanics from each other as to how they produce their damage and the feel is much different. That makes 5th significantly superior to 3rd through 4th and Pathfinder in my book. Plenty of people HATE pathfinder and D&D 3/3/5 because the balance is such crap.

 Massawyrm wrote:

 warboss wrote:
Also, the common complaint about 4e (among many others) was that it was "balanced" to the point of boredom because that balance was acheived by frequently copy pasting the same abilities to every class with only minor tweaks.

In any case, "balance" had nothing to do with the demise of 4e.

This is the third time in this thread that someone has come in saying some iteration of 'It's not the balance, it was the balance."

In your example, the Rogue and Fighter were balanced by the fact that the rogue could do an additional 2d6 damage with combat advantage (with access to a number of abilities facilitating that), but had a lower AC and hit points than the Fighter (who had abilities that drew attacks from monsters) making them play very differently on the table despite their mechanics looking very similar in carefully curated examples. In the early playtest materials for 4th, they included the statistical breakdowns they used for survivability vs damage output, with the scaling all the way up to 30th for the creation of new classes and monsters - materials they ended up omitting from the final product. The entire thing was built elegantly on math that seemed very simple on the surface, but went pretty deep. Each class managed to play differently despite their ultimate damage output/effect on the game being nearly identical in scenarios taking them from full health to zero.

I still play it because I love how it plays on the tabletop, and because I've grown tired of many of the legacy issues that plagued the game from 1st - 3rd. When I want to have some crazy, imbalanced fun, I invite over a few select friends and we blow through a BECME module. But for our weekly game, we go with 4th.

I agree with your notion of what a wargame *should* be, but what I'm talking about isn't some platonic ideal - I'm talking about the very real marketing problems GW is facing and their attempts to solve them. I cited the balance rejection of 4e, and you guys came in to say it wasn't the balance, it's that you didn't like the way they balanced it. And I'm having a devil of a time trying to see the distinction. I don't believe there's some magical balance system that will somehow sell more GW minis. And it's clear that GW doesn't seem to think so either.

In case it wasn't obvious, puting the word most of the time in quotes is a signal that I don't believe it is a correct term. I don't think 4e was any more balanced than a game of rock paper scissors where you can ONLY pick rock. The balance that I'm referring to is when you make a series of DIFFERENT rules somehow worth the same overall in a game. YMMV. In any case, it is in the end an opinion. Despite it being the shortest D&D edition in recent memory (didn't play OD&D or 1st edition... just 2 years until essentials came out and essentials lasted even less before 5e public trials were announced), some folks liked it and that's fine. My point was two fold.. you can't just copy paste an (incorrect) assumption about an RPG over to a completely different style of game (wargame).

I do agree that GW has a very real marketing problem but like with WOTC's D&D 4e, I don't think their approach towards it is optimal nor successful compared to alternatives. Gamebalance isn't "magical" but rather a difficult goal you strive towards. It has never perfectly existing in 40k but at least before the modern era of 40k and GW (6e/7e) it still felt like they were striving towards it and generally getting better (with the obvious occasional exception). Nowadays, it feels like they're just throwing everything on the wall without thought or plan and just seeing what sticks/sells without regard to the mess it is making.

"Who cares if you're playing SM or CSM if all their points lead to the armies being effectively same? In a system like that, things only look different and have marginally different abilities. Just like the character classes in 4e. "

Starcraft called to let you know that you can have very different units and still have balance in a game.

The issue is this: a carrier in Starcraft is not that expensive resource-wise it is TEMPORALLY expensive. This mechanic doesn't exist in 40K. In 40K, Eldar or whomever can just plunk their badass unit down on the table turn 1. If Protoss could somehow start with a carrier, a lot of units would be rendered useless, just like in 40K.

I'm glad that some garage groups are having fun, but rendering any unit useless detracts from any game, imo.

I think that some of the experiences of "garage" games makes sense, given some of the info GW had let slip in the past about their customer base. I know at one point, it was assumed that that many kits were bought and simply collected, never even taken out of the box. Another big chunk were built and painted, but rarely, if ever, played.

Basically, GW makes it money off of a combination of kids entering the hobby and buying starter sets, and guys with garages and basements full of GW models that will never see a tabletop. That's not inconsistent with what I've seen. Every group has the guy with multiple major armies. I know I want to keep buying/building 40k even as I have little interest in the game as a game.

 Massawyrm wrote:

But that *is* balance and exactly what I'm talking about. A 4e character is going to do roughly the same damage and hit roughly as often taking one set of feats as they do another, thus they weren't "meaningful." The same thing applies to 40k. If a unit is costed perfectly with all of its other counterparts, rating damage output vs survivability (the balance system in place in 4e) along with point variance for speed, your choices are equally meaningless. Plague marines will end up costing only slightly more than CSM because, while they last longer on the board they also have fewer guns for an equal number of points. Who cares if you're playing SM or CSM if all their points lead to the armies being effectively same? In a system like that, things only look different and have marginally different abilities. Just like the character classes in 4e.

Sorry, but smart point costs based on combat effectiveness, just like pretty much every other miniatures game out there uses other than 40k does not make a "boring" game. In Flames of war the game is well balanced, but playing a British Irish guards tank company is hardly the same as playing a soviet tankovy force. Both are armored armies, but both play radically differently based on the rules for their overall nation. Balance doesn't mean homogeneous everything is exactly the same. You need to stop equating balance with symmetry. Symmetry is what sucks and symmetry is what 4th edition D&D had in spades. Every striker played exactly the same way. Every defender was a defender was a defender. BORING, but again that is not balance, but symmetry. Yes symmetry is balanced, but it is boring. Balance can happen just fine without symmetry.

You seem to think that people only play SM or CSM solely because of the stats. If that were the case NO ONE would play chaos space marines ever. They just suck compared to all the cool new toys being released. I play the armies I play because of the stories and the fluff behind them, because I like the modeling projects and the way the armies look on the table. X points of Space marines will not look the same as X points of eldar, nor will they play the same way on the table either. A 1000 point IG army should still vastly out number and outgun a 1000 point space marine army, and both will play totally differently. You need to stop believing that balance will make it pointless to play different armies,because that is not true. Real balance in the game would mean armies would be many and varied again because there would be no top tier and bottom tier armies with a bunch of OK stuff in the middle. It would also mean that armies of certain factions will no longer never have certain units in them anymore because there will no longer be sucky overpriced units in a codex either. Suddenly not everyone is playing plague marines because other marine builds also are viable and start appearing again with some regularity. Balance would only make things better overall. It improves the game, improves the variety and improves the meta as well. No need to spam one unit when you can fill your army with a variety of units and still get the job done because the other armies are balanced too. It also means you would no longer need to have your own group of regular players because there would be less silly power imbalances between armies.

If the folks making X-Wing made a new custom fighter for the game that was as fast as the A-wing and had all the weapons of a B-wing it would have a cost that would be higher than either of them. Meanwhile in a GW game they would make such a beast and then make it cost less than either making the originals completely pointless to use when you could just buy up a bunch of cheaper and more powerful unit. This kind of crap is what is killing 40k and making the all the armies just look more and more the same all the time.

Skriker

I didn't really "get" D&D Essentials. I bought all the books but it looked just like 4e to me. Was there actually a difference?

 Massawyrm wrote:
Except that it's my reality, and the reality that several other garage gamers have shown up in this very thread to echo.

That's nice. It's also not universal. When I played in the "garage" it was no different than how I played in stores. The problem here is that you keep assuming that your group of friends defines "garage gaming" and if you just get rid of the in-store gaming everyone will play and buy like you.

Otherwise, how the hell was 4e like WoW in any way that wasn't WoW ripping off D&D?

Because it was all about a standardized party with standardized class roles (healer, DPS, control) with minimal customization fighting against standardized opponents in grid-based miniatures combat. Non-combat options were removed almost entirely, variant classes that diverged from the healer/DPS/control roles were removed, etc.

Yes, let's cite a game from the biggest IP in the world, that is still in its infancy, and still isn't coming close to GWs market share. If FFG can still pull that off 5 years from now, I will be elated. I've got good friends working there. I want them, and the model, to succeed. But right now it's too young to cite as an example. EVERYTHING Star Wars does well early on.

X-Wing is hardly "still in its infancy". It's a very popular game with an established history of new content releases. If anything X-Wing is nearing the end of its life because it's running out of interesting ships in the source material. And the reason I mentioned it is because it's the game I actually play and have experience with. I'm sure other games succeed despite (or even because of) good balance, but I don't have personal experience with those games.

Because they knew we would still play with it. And we are. They won't rerelease them (shame) because that would nullify their EXCLUSIVE! But we're still going to use it. If ITC chooses to ban it, you might see some backlash against it, but I doubt they will. Those guys won't support Pay2Win.

Are you seriously arguing that GW endorses piracy of their rules?

I don't think Massawyrm understood my point and to be fair I'm not sure I articulated it all that well. Anyway there are a few things I'm trying to say. One is that I think it is a bad idea to focus on one group of gamers to the exclusion of another especially if GW can with reasonable effectiveness target both.

A second point closely tied to this is that I think it is probably much easier to keep the garage gamers Massawrym is describing happy than the store gamers. Now perhaps GW is saying fine, lets just take the easy route, ignore the people that are hard to please and just do what we want since the garage gamers are going to be happy with whatever and they are all we need. If that is GW's thinking, it is foolish as suggested by declining sales numbers.

Third, reasonably balanced rules should appeal to everyone, and going back to my second point if there are garage gamers who somehow don't like the current ruleset they are most able to house rule to their liking so really are the ones least in need of pleasing with the current ruleset.

I played from 3d edition after trial assault rules to first few months of 5th edition. During that time there was a wide variety of unique rules available through white dwarf and various rules supplements, but the core game was limited. I liked that far more than what we have now and I think it covered most of the things that Massawyrm is talking about liking about the current ruleset. (I think there were plenty of unique terrain rules in things like city fight and perhaps others, but don't know that for sure as I didn't play those things). I don't know why garage gamers need fliers or superheavies to be incorporated in the core rules when if your group wants to play those there were rules available to play them. Putting that stuff in the core rules impacts the store gamer far more than the garage gamer because now they are more or less forced to put up with that stuff even if they don't like it.

My experience with store gaming was very different than the bad light that has been cast here. I was able to show up with the list I wanted to play and be competitive throughout the time I played. I played Eldar and Dark Eldar and actively avoided the things that people thought were cheesy about the army, so I avoided starcannon and wraithlord spam in 3rd, and didn't have tons of "unkillable" skimmers in 4th. I wasn't forced by the meta to play stuff I didn't want to. There was tremendous variety of opponents and armies. There were plenty of decent people to play against. I got to know many of them fairly well and wasn't forced to bring the fully optimized uber tournament list every game to not get rolled. Admittedly we didn't stray far from the core rules often, (though I remember one dude playing some version of space marines from a white dwarf page or something with special ammunition for their bolters and I was fine with him doing that as I just wanted to play) but the garage gamers weren't limited from doing so at the time so as far as I can tell the game was well set up for both groups.

Right now it seems like GW is trying to force people to play a certain way and buy certain models. Garage gamers can just ignore that pressure and continue to play how they want, i.e. ignore what GW wants from them. Store gamers on the other hand will have more difficulty ignoring GW as developing a convention outside the core rules is much more difficult in that envirionment.

So basically what it seems like to me is that, contrary to Massawyrm's assertions, GW is actually targeting the store gamer with its current policies and actively driving many of them away. The garage gamer is fine with what GW is doing, but not because GW is targeting them or trying to make them happy, but because they can ignore the stuff GW is doing that they don't like much more easily than the store gamer while still benefitting from the changes they do like. That would be the same though if GW was doing a better job making the store players happy.


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One final comment. I am not commenting on GW's policies regarding what they have done with its stores or how it is interacting with unafilliated stores that sell its product. My focus is more on its rules writing.

Having been a GW fanatic for 25 years I can say that GWs storefronts come & go with the economy. When there rolling in cash they open a lot of stores. When the economys hurting they close up everything. This retraction has been greater than any before, but I think thats in reaction to the greatest economic set back since The Great Depression.

I believe that the storefronts will be back, but thier real money makers are the garage groups. Ive always found the lgs scene less then welcoming. If the red shirts werent on the look out the newbs could end up playing against the TFG.

As for the OP, look on craigs list or Facebook. Theres some closeted gamer looking for another player. Some poor sob that thinks theres no other gamers in town. Just hope he ain't 13 years old or some neck bearded grognard. Good luck

The cultural norm in Canada is to use the garage for "storage" little gaming can happen there.
That leaves the basement that is typically unfinished and colder than Alaska all season.

Since the rules suck for pick-up games (too much power variation for same points) garage play is pretty much it.

GW corporate feels we are all collectors and quietly tool away at our models and put them on display in our basement.
GW codex / game writers think we should run fluffy games and it is just a sandbox for playing out all those cool fictional events.
Some of us like to look at it as a social event to go out and play and that is rather problematic.

This has been from my own perspective the most controversial times I have experienced for gaming (since second edition!) for rules problems, power levels / balance vastly varied, just plain old game play happiness is rather subdued. Publication release and models have been incredible for speed but are poorly supported by the rules.

Ah well, I have stopped buying models for a bit and see what I can do with what I have.

Why do people so often confuse balance with everything being the same. Balance means you can take a variety of options or armys and have them as viable play styles not that everything plays the same.

Starcraft is mostly balanced for example but the three races play differently.

Or look at a fighter vs a thief in an RPG. A fighter will beat the thief in a straight fight but if the theif sneaks up on the fighter he should be able to beat the fighter. That's balanced but two radically different play styles.

Hell I would say a lack of balance cuts meaningful choices and homogonises stuff more than balance does. Because without balance you are reduced to a limited number of viable choices and lots of choices that are next to useless.

 Peregrine wrote:

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 Purifier wrote:
I know how much space it takes up. Please see the comment where you quoted me saying that I have a setup. Understand me when I'm saying that it's more space than a lot of us have to spare. Out of the 4 of us main guys in my gaming group, 2 of us can store it. One with quite a lot of difficulty. The other two simply don't have the room to store three table tops.

I just don't understand this. Are your apartments the size of closets? Or are you just confusing "I don't have any space" with "I don't want to get creative with my storage arrangements"?

Speaking only about the UK houses and flats in the UK are considerably smaller than a their american counterparts.

Judging by the last few places I lived

Where I am I could fit a table if I packed it away between sessions

Last place I wouldn't have been able to

Place before that I wouldn't have been able to

Place before that I had a very big living room and could have had a table set up permanently.

the several places before that would have had no room for a table

Its a mixed bag

 Talizvar wrote:
The cultural norm in Canada is to use the garage for "storage" little gaming can happen there.
That leaves the basement that is typically unfinished and colder than Alaska all season.

Pffffft... you must not be from Vancouver

Just to point out the obvious, even in Toronto you can turn a heater on in the winter The scary part is air conditioning the parts of the house OTHER than the basement during the summer. I am spending more on air conditioning than GW this month LOL.

For us, btw, I would die of heat playing in the garage in June-August!

 Massawyrm wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.

Which edition are you talking about? Certainly not 1st-3.5. 4th had rigid balance and they expanded solely through additional classes and delayed completion of previous classes. And 5th isn't a year old yet. So, you know, try again.

druid, wizard, cleric

3 of the most broken classes in 3.5

try again, 3.5 and d20 in general is one of the easiest to break and least interesting gaming systems ever devised. that's sort of what happens when you have 100+ sourcebooks, no internal balance team, OGL, and you're primarily interested in the rules for hitting people. that kind of simplification works when you're dealing with armies, not individual characters imo

i vastly prefer systems like the new world of darkness when it comes to pen and paper games

"druid, wizard, cleric

3 of the most broken classes in 3.5 "

Also true in Pathfinder.

 Massawyrm wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:
The idea that 4th failed because it was "balanced" is absurd. It was a boring version of an MMO that was simplified without any meaningful character choices.

But that *is* balance and exactly what I'm talking about. A 4e character is going to do roughly the same damage and hit roughly as often taking one set of feats as they do another, thus they weren't "meaningful." The same thing applies to 40k. If a unit is costed perfectly with all of its other counterparts, rating damage output vs survivability (the balance system in place in 4e) along with point variance for speed, your choices are equally meaningless. Plague marines will end up costing only slightly more than CSM because, while they last longer on the board they also have fewer guns for an equal number of points. Who cares if you're playing SM or CSM if all their points lead to the armies being effectively same? In a system like that, things only look different and have marginally different abilities. Just like the character classes in 4e.

Also, I don't think GW's crappy rules "appeal to garage gamers." It just sounds like garage gamers have much lower standards because they just make up whatever they want.
That's not an upside to crappy rules.

The rules we're talking about aren't crappy. They're narrative. They make terrain matter more than a straight cover save. Some of us like that. We like things like exploding barrels and buildings that provide distinct advantages on the field over other buildings on the field. But they're also the type of thing that creates imbalance in tournament environment. Tournaments rules are best when all things are equal. Ending up on a field where your opponent gets much more useful terrain on his side of the board because he got a lucky die roll gives them the kind of advantage that destroys that balance. The only thing guys like me enjoy making up are our stories. That's why rules like this have been great for us - we've been given reams of options for creating those stories without having to make up our own rules.

OH, I get it. You just have no clue what we're talking about when we say "balance." You see, balance doesn't equal "same. Two armies can play very differently and still be balance. Your idea that balance = sameness/boringness is wrong.
Evidence you ask? Almost every other game out there does balance far better than GW. Pick one. Go ahead. Yup, that's better balanced.
"But they're not perfect!" You say?
Irrelevant. We're not asking for perfect balance. "Close enough" is down right good enough.
Imbalance doesn't make a good game. It just means player A has a better chance of winning.
A balanced game can be just as narrative and I say, more so than an imbalanced one. If your army of super High Altitude Coast Guard guys are supposed to be the best, but get stomped without pity by a much less optimized army of space feiries just because the SF's have better everything, that cuts into the suspension of disbelief.